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LOL: saw the subj phrase in here:

https://thebreakthrough.org/in...?

The Passion of Alvin Weinberg provides a fascinating look at what is perhaps the most important humanitarian effort of the last century. Solving the root problem was and continues to be the best option. Half-baked "solutions" have proven ineffective, and will likely only compound the problem. We don't need more; we need to be objective about what works.

The EPA has left harmful regulations in place for decades, which caused 1600 unnecessary deaths at Fukushima, and countless more by helping suppress the most effective source of clean energy. While renewables may capture the limelight, the leading source of new energy worldwide is coal, and it is growing far faster.

Present radiation regulations are based on bad science. The linear no threshold hypothesis is provably false today, and counter evidence already existed even at the time of its adoption. Since then, a growing body of evidence and scientific understanding show that low levels of radiation are harmless and potentially beneficial. Aside from providing a basis for fear-mongering, misinformed regulations also prevent promising research into the use of low level radiation for medical applications.

Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information have recently petitioned the EPA for scientific/risk-based radiation regulations. There are also other areas where the EPA adopts the ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) principle for regulation, which is fundamentally misguided. Such regulation carries an opportunity cost, and the extensive effort to eliminate infinitesimal perceived damage is wasted when it could achieve a much greater positive effect if applied to other more serious risks.

Leslie Corrice's Hiroshima Syndrome is the best all-round source. Corrice's site is an amazing work, he has collected into one place facts as they became known, and news coverage of the events. He is particularly attuned to distortions, exaggerations and certain scenarios that have been delivered to the press chosen for their dramatic description despite a laughably low probably. And unlike just about everyone else, he strives to segregate his news reporting from his own commentary.

Some no-hype and anti-hype information sources compiled by The Actinide Age,

What actually happened, written clearly by a radiation professional and teacher, Les Corrice ... Putting Health Risks from Radiation Exposure into Context: Lessons from Past Accidents Professor Geraldine Thomas, Imperial College London, April 2011 ... Also quoted in New Scientist ... The D-shuttle project comparing negligible radiation doses internationally in 2014, and its published open access paper ... Real-time radiation monitoring network for Japan. See if you can find a reading higher than this ... Internal radiocesium contamination of adults and children in Fukushima 7 to 20 months after the Fukushima NPP accident (all below detection limit in 2012) ... in Proceedings of the Japan Academy ... Radiation dose rates now and in the future for residents neighboring restricted areas (after 2012, will not cause detectable health impacts) ... in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ... Will Boisvert confirms that wild claims of Japanese thyroid cancers in 2015 are based on bad science. Dr Jonathan Kellogg summarises the academic criticism ... Tim Worstall confirms that wild claims of a single Tepco worker developing radiation cancer is mere anti-nuclear opportunism ... Articles on the mental health impacts of long term evacuation in Medical News Today and Tech Times, and the cited 2015 Lancet study ... Ocean contamination in 2012(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and in 2015(Scientific Reports) --- already comparable to natural radioactivity ...

Nope—There’s No Thyroid Cancer Epidemic in Fukushima
http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...

Elevated by increased screening, not by radiation. http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...

Even for a much bigger mess like Chernobyl, radiation leakage causes few cancer cases, either among people involved in the cleanup or bystandards. For example, see this World Health Organization report on Chernobyl:

http://www.who.int/ionizing_ra...

Recent investigations suggest a doubling of the incidence of leukaemia among the most highly exposed Chernobyl liquidators. No such increase has been clearly demonstrated among children or adults resident in any of the contaminated areas. ...
While scientists have conducted studies to determine whether cancers in many other organs may have been caused by radiation, reviews by the WHO Expert Group revealed no evidence of increased cancer risks, apart from thyroid cancer, that can clearly be attributed to radiation from Chernobyl.

So the people who get a large dose of radiation are twice as likely to develop leukemia, which sucks, but leukemia isn't that common to begin with. Among bystanders, the only measurable increase in cancer was thyroid cancer, and that happened because the USSR did a crappy job (no surprise there) and fed a bunch of kids contaminated milk (see previous link). In short, the thyroid cancer could easily have been prevented -- especially because potassium iodide pills are supposed to be an effective way to prevent thyroid cancer caused by radioactive materials. Thankfully, thyroid cancer has a very high success rate for treatment. (I forget the number, but IIRC it's something like 95%.)

Not surprisingly the "elevated levels of child cancer" linked to in the description applies _only_ to thyroid cancer. Moreover, it's not clear that thyroid cancer in children really spiked. For example, see http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...

Considering that Fukushima was much more contained than Chernobyl, I doubt that we'll see that many cancer cases from Fukushima.

I did some reading on Chernobyl several years ago, and going in, I expected that the disaster would have caused a lot of cancer deaths. I was surprised to learn that it didn't, but it makes sense now that I think about it. Yes, a lot of radioactive material got released, but the world is a _big_ place. One reactor's worth of radioactive material diluted over a large area isn't _that_ big a deal. Yes, it's a big enough deal that it's probably unsafe to live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, but the effect beyond that is quite limited. Even if a reactor goes pop every few decades, it'll still probably cause less environmental damage than all the coal we use in the same period.

It's quite feasible to go full renewable in 35 years. The storage problem is due to the fact that we have dumb grids.

You've got nuclear the other way around. Nuclear can never be a short-term solution because of the painfully slow roll-out rate of reactors. Even in the 1970's (the peak of nuclear reactor-building worldwide, before TMI and Chernobyl, when everyone loved nuclear) the rate of new reactor roll-out was far slower than would have been required to merely keep up with the new demand in electricity.

30-50 years would be the timescale required to merely get nuclear to replace some of the current oil and coal capacity, assuming everyone suddenly went full-bore in the nuclear direction. By then we might not even need it any more.

Nuclear is slow to roll out on a large scale but thus far solar and wind have been slower.

Now, that statement can be criticized because it counts only wind and solar as renewables. But this omission can easily be defended. Biomass takes 32 years to pay off its carbon debt relative to coal power generation (see Figure 1). That is to say, although in the long term biomass combustion is carbon-neutral (assuming the biomass is regenerated in a forest set aside for the purpose), in the short term (while the forest is initially growing) biomass releases more carbon dioxide per GWh than does coal. So biomass may be a long-term solution, but if we are concerned about the temperature increase occurring right now, and during the next 50 years, biomass is not going to be much help and could even be worse than just burning coal.

Also, Areva's reactors are so extremely large that special equipment is needed to make them. See this PDF file: How to Make Nuclear Cheap - The Breakthrough Institute. Quote: "Very large Gen III+ reactors have experienced construction delays and cost overruns."

Damn right. People should watch Cool It (2010) by Bjørn Lomborg. There are many cheaper solutions to prevent climate change than Luddite energy conservation, solar+wind+biomass+geothermal only future. Heck those people have trouble even with big hydro power (insane).
The reality is those defending a nuclear free future have an complete agenda 99% of the population would never approve, they hide they full agenda behind climate change. Building more nuclear power in the world is the only certain way to fully prevent climate change without making electricity too expensive. Germany energiewende is far more expensive than Olkiluoto with all of its cost overruns:
  http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...
And BTW Olkiluoto absurd costs might indicate Areva's EPR design is too expensive, but we should way 2 more years when the first EPR installation in China enters operation. Yep, China has been building all of those reactors the anti nukes swear are too expensive on budget and on schedule, since Green Peace can't sue the to stop and lobby politicians to throw similar potholes in the way of nuclear projects.

Really? Unit 2?

Picture of all four, #1 - #4, right to left

Looks like #2 is the only one that didn't blow the building apart, and there's an awful lot of damage on the side of #4 that's away from the rest of the reactor buildings.

Half of it's supposed academic writings in this supposed economic journal are editorials about how unfair the media is to conservatives. Now, that kind of writing, in moderation and in an appropriately academic framing can fit within the model of a good journal. I don't mean to say "Journals can't have editorial". But half, with a message-based push is past the point of credibility.

Take this piece as an example. It sort of adopts the tone of an academic writing, but is clearly out of place in an "economic" journal. It'd be a perfectly reasonable piece I'd disagree with on a number of points in a newspaper editorial, but what the fuck does it have to do with economics?

This is not honest analysis. Not even remotely.

I heard that modern weather models have accuracy above 80%.

But weather is not climate, as we get reminded by Warmists every time there is a cold snap (they are mysteriously silent on this issue when there's a heat wave.)

Furthermore, predicting "the weather will be the same tomorrow as today" gets you about 70% accuracy (http://www.weatheranalytics.com/wa/weather-report-forecasts-improving-climate-gets-wilder/) so the increment to a shade over 80% at a cost of millions in hardware and enormous computational complexity is nothing to write home about.

Furthermore, this new report, if it withstands the test of time, is one more demonstration that anyone who says "the science is settled" is a political shill (likely for the far left: http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...)

Every few months we get an announcement of a new way in which climate models are wrong. For purely political reasons this is usually couched in terms of "worse" or "better" (usually worse, because that's what sells eyeballs) but to a scientist what matters is "correct" or "incorrect". The sign of the error is relatively uninteresting when evaluating the quality of the science.

And don't get me wrong: anthropogenic climate change is real and significant, and we should be aggressively pursuing changes. Carbon taxes, in particular, are an proven-effective policy that both reduce CO2 emissions and reduce income taxes and corporate taxes, so anyone who opposes them must be in favour of higher income taxes and corporate taxes.

And anyone who says both "ACC could result in the end of civilization" and "We should not be building new nuclear plants" is beyond evil. Nuclear power is a significant component of the climate change solution because it is the only generally-available, proven-effective replacement for base-load coal, and coal is a huge contributor to GHG emissions.

When renewable advocates boast about energy production, the numbers are inevitable inflated by huge amounts of biomass, or meaningless capacity numbers which do not represent actual energy delivered. Leveling forests to burn for fuel is not environmentally friendly, and not even carbon neutral on the time scales that matter. In some cases, forests are pelletized and shipped over seas, making the carbon impact even worse than burning coal. Unfortunately, aside from hydro, it is the only renewable that is reliable, and thus forms an integral part of "renewable" plans. More typically though, coal and gas take up the slack.

Read more about Australia specifically, or bioenergy in general. Sadly there is only one form of clean energy that is environmentally friendly and scalable, and the renewable fanatics will have nothing to do with it, instead promoting a world of poverty and mass environmental devastation. While solar and wind have their place, it would be much more effective to complement them with nuclear instead.

Solar versus nuclear: a question of scale. Further comments go into detail about resources and areas.

Read about Germany for an idea of what $50 billion will buy in terms of renewables--that is a drop in the bucket of their expenditures. Despite having been at it for more than a decade, they have little to show for it except skyrocketing electricity prices. Replacing fossil fuels with solar is an expensive fantasy.

From http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/the_semiconductor_revolution_m:

NASA, deep into planning for the Apollo Project, needed advanced circuits for the Saturn rocket's onboard guidance computer. Microchips promised unparalleled computing power at a small size, but they were unproven in the marketplace and had never been produced on a large scale. Nonetheless, Eldon Hall, a NASA official, decided to take a risk on the promising new technology. Soon, private companies were churning out massive amounts of purpose-built Apollo Guidance Computer microchips. In fact, NASA bought so many that manufacturers were able to achieve huge improvements in the production process - so much so, in fact, that the price of the Apollo microchip fell from $1000 per unit to between $20 and $30 per unit in the span of a couple years.

Not necessarily. This story does a good job explaining that many solutions to global warming involve completely turning our backs on the poor.

http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenberger-and-ted-nordhaus//the-great-progressive-reversal/

That is not "no harm, no foul".

I'm not saying, "damn the consequences, coal power for the poor". But I am saying that the idea that we can improve peoples lives without giving them affordable power is a preposterous "nobel savage" myth.

The climate scientists that chastised the environmentalists that are hellbent against Nuclear power have a point. It is our best answer for generating the power the world needs without the greenhouse gas emissions the world does not.

Gordon's Paper has been thoroughly investigated by Roger Pielke Jnr at the Breakthrough Institute.

Gordon's smoothing of growth fails to show the variability and creates a picture of trends that are not really there. A quote from the article linked above:

In short, there is no evidence of a stair step reduction in the growth rate of US per capita GDP in either dataset. The US BEA and Census data shows essentially no change (a linear trend, blue line, shows a statistically insignificant downward tick) whereas the Maddison data shows a bit of an increase (red line). The data is sensitive to the time period chosen – for instance, from 1970 the BEA/Census data shows an increase in the annual rate of per capita GDP growth. I can find no evidence of a post-1950 secular decline in per capita economic growth in the United States, and in fact, there is evidence that growth rates have accelerated a bit from 1970.

Meanwhile Germany does the switch to renewables

That paper is anecdote and frenzied predictions. The facts show that Germany is turning to coal. Renewables are no more capable of supplying the base-load for the advanced economy of Germany than it is anywhere else, which is to say not at all.

Japan has elected people that believe in industry, wealth creation and prosperity. Japan has chosen not to decline. Part of that is electing people that don't indulge nuclear hysteria.